Cold water in vast Western Pacific, record water vapor, clouds, rain — super big El Nino things going on

Indo-pacific-warm-pool (IPWP) | NotricksZone

A very striking pattern of records is happening at the moment. Data is going “off the chart” on several factors at once. As well as record high temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere in Feb 2016, the water is far cooler than usual in the Indo Pacific, while there is increased water vapor and cloud all over the world’s oceans. But windspeeds are slow, slow, slow. It has the hallmarks of a very Big El Nino. Bigger by many measures than 1997-98.

The cooler Indo-Pacific

P Gosselin at NotricksZone has got some very interesting graphs about the ocean around the vast Western Pacific. Frank Bosse and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt noticed that ARGO buoys are recording a very unusual cooling in the Indo-Pacific Western Pacific.

Is something fishy and odd going on there? Hard to say, but while the globe set a record last month, it is interesting to know that over the last couple of years temperatures have declined in the Western Pacific by a whole degree. The Indo-Pacific Warm Pool (IPWP) covers 20N to 20S across a full quarter of the circumference of the Earth. According to Bosse and Vahrenholt it’s around “16 million cubic kilometers“.

The blue blob in 2016 in the graph below looks smallish (right hand side), but it represents a large section of the Earth. And the temperature of the IPWP has dropped 1°C since early 2013. Smaller hints of blue blobs occur briefly in 2006-7 and 2009-10, both during small El-Ninos. Is the current cool pool just a big “El Nino” phenomenon? I wish we had data from 1997-98 to compare.

So there is a very large pool of subsurface water that’s cooler than usual across this large slab of water. Bill Kininmonth gave the best description I’ve yet seen on how the world changes during an El Nino. Our oceans are mostly deep and cold — they average 4km deep and most of that is near freezing. Even under the topics the water is only 4C. Above that rests a thin warm top layer which is pushed around by the winds. In an El Nino the trade winds across the Pacific slow down and that keeps the warmer water near the surface of the central Pacific instead of pushing that warm water right across to the Western Indo-Pacific. In a La Nina the extra winds push the warm water far westward, and there is an upwelling of the vast cold pool on the Eastern side of the Pacific. Fingers of cold water reach the surface and draw down the heat from the air above. Think of that massive abyssal cold volume that can reach up and suck the heat out of the sky. That’s why temperatures swing globally.

See the blue cold water in the Indo-Pacific? The scientists who tell us that the February heat records are due to man-made climate change are effectively saying that the cold pool in the IPWP is due to CO2 10,000m above. Follow the chain… cry for cause and effect. (dbar = decibar, and I calculate 100 dbar as about 100 meters, 200 dbar as about 200 meters, and 500 dbar as about 500 meters at the equator.)

I don’t know how record breakingly extraordinary it is for the warm-pool to be a cool-pool, because our records with this much detail are so short. But we know Global Climate Models can not predict this. Where are the real scientists who are reminding their colleagues that an El Nino is not man-made?

What’s going on with Water Vapor?

Roy Spencer reports that humidity is very high over the Pacific — remarkably high. Wow, that’s a spike and this graph is the monster vast 60N – 60S across the whole world’s oceans.

It makes sense that if the warm pool of water is not being stirred by winds into the deep cold water, that we would see higher water vapor over the top of it. Interestingly this is so much higher than the 97-98 El Nino.

As an aside: David Evans and I are always harping on about the importance of water vapor, but this graph doesn’t necessarily tell us as much as you might think, because it’s not the total water vapor that matters, it’s only the layer at the top, where the water vapor emits freely to space (that’s from the WVEL, the water vapor emissions layer). Roy Spencer’s graph shows “SSMIS vertically integrated water vapor anomalies”, which includes water vapor low in the troposphere as well as the higher zone. It’s closely tied to the Sea Surface Temperature (SST). The better radiosonde data, from 1973, shows that the humidity trend is of increasing in the lower troposphere even while the upper troposphere is drying out and the WVEL is dropping slightly. As Garth Paltridge suggested in 2009, this is apparently associated with a more stable, moister lower troposphere where less water vapor is entrained and breaking out into the upper troposphere (see here). The climate models are emphatic that the WVEL trend should have been rising and the upper troposphere getting more humid as it warms (the water vapor amplification that amplifies the CO2 warming).

Back to the current record breaking action.

The sea surface is very very warm…

…

…because the winds are very slow

Again, thanks to Roy Spencer — we can see the winds are slower than in the 97-98 El Nino, but it has been as slow in late 87 and late 89. How does the last 30 years compare to the 100 before that? (Data, data, I want more data.) The average line here might not be representative of the real long term average at all.

…

Bottom line – this is a Big El Nino, it’s noise, not global warming

What we have at the moment is a record breaking El Nino. (But it may not be very record breaking if only we had this kind of data for earlier El Nino’s). What does this tell us about the Pause? I don’t know — perhaps it’s over, perhaps it’s not. February is noise, not signal.We can’t tell until we see what happens in a couple of year’s time. Perhaps this is a big shift? Perhaps a spike. History will tell.

See Roy Spencer’s blog for more graphs and an interesting difference with 1998 – where there was a cool ring in the Pacific around the “hot” blob, and that circle of cold is not present this year. Who knows why? Stephen Wilde suggests it is due to the “wavier” jet streams we have now (which may in turn be due to the strange solar activity we have now compared to 1997-98). See Wilde’s post here for more info about those extended jet stream waves which stretch far south and north when the solar activity is low.

Roy Spencer: “The total cloud water anomaly for February was also at a record high, at 13% above average”

Stephen Wilde: Wavier jet stream tracks produce longer lines of air mass mixing, hence more clouds and less solar energy entering the oceans to replenish warmth lost from oceans to air by convection.

Looking at the wind graph, perhaps there is an explanation for the Pause (which has been suggested among the 50 odd excuses) — perhaps wind speeds have been higher than normal for the last 18 years which has “stirred in the heat”. That’s why I ask about the long term average. We just don’t know from this graph.

EXTRA Tidbit: For those who are interested, the Western Pacific pours out around Indonesia into the Indian Ocean. It’s a pretty big deal for us Western Australians. We end up with that warm water running down along the coast past Perth. It’s why the most southern corals in the world grow around the island off the coast here at 32S.

h/t AndyG, TedM

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Cold water in vast Western Pacific, record water vapor, clouds, rain -- super big El Nino things going on, 8.7 out of 10 based on 69 ratings

186 comments to Cold water in vast Western Pacific, record water vapor, clouds, rain — super big El Nino things going on

Why keeps me wondering if a wavier Jet stream is implied in higher delta T from equator to pole. The past 20 years winter has been a lot milder than the prior 20. Bit of a worry that it’s on a steady slow decline, with record ice expansion. Not that I want it to get colder, I just find it curious that the juxtaposition of pressure systems that defines the jet stream’s path and intensity are consistently keeping the cold in the south still. I’m wondering what it is that changes to actually kick it further north, for 3 or 4 years in a row, but doesn’t do it now, when it’s clear Antarctica is getting a bit colder and T contrast accentuated.

I was just looking at Peter Andrews work again. He was on Australian Story once.

I might venture to postulate that perhaps according to his logic, deforestation causes water to evaporate relatively immediately instead of slowly being released by plants after they trap it acting like a buffer.

Anecdotally, the 1970s winter low temps I experienced were consistently colder than anything experienced before or since. The 1980s had two cold years I can remember, but little like it since, in terms of sustained uncomfortable coldness and frost.

I’m ~19 degrees south, so when we get sustained frost and especially cold conditions for a whole winter it’s memorable.

So that’s why I ask, why is this not still occurring like it was, if water around Antarctica has been slowly cooling since 1980 to now?

The temp difference from tropics to pole is actually higher now. The south has cooled and the tropics have mostly warmed. So why is the colder air remaining in the south now?

The temp difference should (simplistically) promote a more dynamic exchange of Hadley cell low and southern highs but not eventuating? And until (recently) in Jo’s graph, winds have also fallen away north of -60S as well. The opposite of expectation.

So what really pushes that cold air north for 3 to 4 years in a row, like it did in the 1970s, and occasionally in the 1980s, but now mostly stays south?

It seems this is very much implicated in why we’re having much milder shorter winters in the tropics.

So if anyone knows a viable explanation/mechanism for why pressure systems aren’t doing what you’d otherwise expect, re the increasing temp difference tropics to pole, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this.

That’s the theory, yes, but where’s the cool/cold more variable winters this should bring?

That’s why I’m asking, this isn’t evident as yet even though T difference has increased.

If anything SE trade winds have steadily reduced over the years. They occur to re-balance the upper NE-erly flow from the Tropical Hadley cell to the mid-latitude highs. The lower flow can only be redirected or slowed if the upper part of the cell has slowed as well (which he explains as slowing convection … of the whole cell). I see some possible merit in what Stephen says re slowing convection due cloudiness, meaning a slower Hadley cell turnover, and less SE return flow at the lower layers.

But, if the tropical cell is hotter, and more energy is concentrated at the lower level, this is a pretty good unstable set up for faster convection rise through the freezing layer, and accelerating upward from there in storm cells. He seems to be saying the acceleration above the freezing layer is relatively lower because humidity is now lower. This does not seem right to me, as the humidity get up there only via rapid convection depositing it there. Otherwise it is not there.

So if it reduces it means convection cell altitudes reduced (not merely slowed). Why? Well one explanation is the freezing layer got higher so less cumulus was able to rise fast enough to punch through it and rise faster past it. and that makes sense if the lower troposphere is heating. and would make for more and deeper topical cloudiness to shade the ocean (but has that happened?).

And that’s consistent with what Jo (and Roy Spencer) shows herein this article.

Now this seems to me to all be caused by whatever is attenuating the southern SE-erly low-level return Trade wind air, so that it no longer does as it once did, in prior decades, thus producing this tropical low-levels slow warming.

So that’s the mechanism I’m looking for, what really kicks this air north on southerly pulses/transients. As this is what produces the cooler variability.

As the SE trade flow converges its flow on the equatorial low latitude tropics and pushes convection higher there by convergence, thus makes the upper troposphere wetter, via pushing water higher then, as well. And then the Hadley cell flow spreads it out in the upper levels and takes it further south.

So the drying out of the upper troposphere, and moistening of the lower troposphere, is the result of this failure of southern air to come consistently north on the SE flow, and thus dropped the convergence, and is happening despite the increasing T difference, equator to pole, as the pole slowly cools and the tropics slowly warm, thus the mechanism Stephen is proposing is not actually returning the southern coolness and variability on the SE flow we are actually getting (or the lack of it, from far south enough, in its flow origin).

I know it’s ‘blocked’ (attenuated rather) but why it’s increasingly attenuated with the passage of three decades is what I want to understand as that’s the thing that’s apparently warming and shortening our winters, and apparently dropping away low-level trade wind convergence in the equatorial belt, thus warming the tropics (and also producing less cyclones in the process) via the lack of stirring and uplift and probable freezing level rise in the tropics (in other words, the upper troposphere cools, as Stephen also says).

Which Jo more-or-less remarked about in this article as well:

“… while there is increased water vapor and cloud all over the world’s oceans. But windspeeds are slow, slow, slow. …”

and

“… Above that rests a thin warm top layer which is pushed around by the winds. In an El Nino the trade winds across the Pacific slow down and that keeps the warmer water near the surface of the central Pacific instead of pushing that warm water right across to the Western Indo-Pacific. …”

and

“… It makes sense that if the warm pool of water is not being stirred by winds into the deep cold water, that we would see higher water vapor over the top of it. Interestingly this is so much higher than the 97-98 El Nino. …”

As I see it, we just haven’t noticed or acknowledged yet that in La Nina’s trade winds have also steadily slowed over decades, and in the pause, relative to prior La Ninas, thus the tropics have very slowly warmed, and this has produced the warmer shorter winters and lower variability in the tropics (thus less storminess).

For me it all comes down to a question of what’s blocking, or rather, attenuating that southern air return flow, so that the slowing growing colder conditions down there does not kick north as forcefully or as far, as it did during the 1970s (a particularly cold decade for our tropics) and then faded further through the 1980s to this day.

Apparently there’s a multi-decade cycle mechanism at work here, altering what we theoretically expected to take place.

So I do understand the mid-latitude highs are not providing the tropical cooling and stirring flow work they formerly have, not to the same degree, so what I’m interested in is the mechanism for why that is, despite slowly getting colder over southern waters, which means higher pressure systems should be increasing in pressure (and the adjacent lows conversely stormier hence pronounced summer blizzards taking place and the ice expansion in winter) yet the trade return flow to tropical/equatorial belt seems to have slowly fallen away as that takes place, thus warming the lower tropics.

This seems to be the direct opposite of what was expected to take place as the AGW thesis posted it flag on a warming taking place firstly and mostly at the poles and thus a legged suppressed warming at tropics, and a warming upper troposphere instead. Bzzzzt! They’re wrong in every respect. No wonder their models and predictions were junk.

And what I would expect, and what Stephen also seems to predict, the greater and more vigorous N-S flow, is also not occurring.

The part missing is the mechanism for the SE-erly lower-level return trade flow, curiously slowing down, even in the La Ninas (apparently).

Assuming that this current El Nino is as large and unusually intense as suggested, the one thing I would almost place money is the almost 100% guarantee that some wack job somewhere that tries to pass himself / herself off as something resembling a “climate scientist” [ although a floor sweeper in the academic quarters of most Australian universities can now class themselves as a "climate scientist" without any questioning at all by the media or the universities of their credentials, ] will come out with a statement, swallowed lock, stock and barrel by a scientifically ignorant and gullible media, that this whole “disastrous” El Nino development is directly the result of “Catastrophic Climate Change”.

And that time is running out for us to “do something”.

Followed by “There is an urgent requirement for more research on the dangerous increases in the El Nino intensity as a result of Climate Change.
Further funding is urgently needed to speed up the research into this Climate Change created development that might have severe and dangerous sea level rise consequences for Tuvalu and Bangladesh. and etc!

I think you mean, “carbon-credit-economy green”, or simply, ‘Carbon Green’.
Very different to merely “green” as Peter Andrews perhaps as an example of this kind of green. Bit old fashioned i know.
Just trying to find some better distinction’s.
Thanks
Mike

Where are those scientists at NOAA, NASA, CSIRO, BOM who predicted all this?

Anway, what’s the problem? Just take those comprehensive climate models and plug in the data and humidity, wind strength, surface temperature and water vapour should just pop right out. After thousands of man years building and testing these supercomputer based models, they should be able to demonstrate all the relationships. Or just increase one factor and see how the others change?

After all, these are the infallible models on which the entire prediction of CO2 driven global warming is based and the conclusions that increased CO2 also produces more extreme events. It’s time for the computer scientists and meteorologists to shine.

Please do not tell the world this is El Nino or Natural Variation and therefore outside the model and completely unknown? People will lose faith. They want to see real value for their trillions of dollars spent. Think of the windmills and solar panels. They will not be in vain.

The one thing we now are beginning to realise and the one major item that climate science hasn’t yet even faced let alone begin to get a very rough idea and handle on is that the benign, slow changing global climate so beloved of the global warming / climate change catastrophists is anything but nice and stable and fixed within close limits.

Or was supposedly benign and slow changing until mankind a few decades ago who came along with his minute quantity of some very special CO2 molecules that far outranks every one of those 95 out of every hundred “natural” CO2 molecules and has been endlessly blamed for causing a constantly “predicted” but so far unseen and unobserved except in some fevered and deeply twisted imaginations, ” Climate Catastrophe” to develop.

The [ global ] climate in the past was only seen as benign because we only could see it through a very narrow localised lenses until satellites became more sophisticated and global communications through the medium of the world wide web allowed both scientists and lay persons to see major , highly destructive weather events almost as they happened.

All those weather events then took on patina of significant Climatic phenomena which then took on a patina of “dangerous” because we could see the weather extremes often concentrated within a few dozen kilometres radius but from media excrement [ or was that supposed to be media "excitement"! ] were made to appear major globe circling disasters almost constantly appearing somewhere on the planet.

The reality has yet to be caught up with in climate science circles, a reality that this, the global climate and the weather systems that compose that global climate is as it has always been, a rapidly but intermittent and unpredictable shifting, sometimes very large shifts, sometimes very subtle almost undetectable climate shifts that are only recognised in their severity much later. sometimes quite localised, sometimes very widespread.

I would suggest that if this El Nino presages another major Pacific and therefore world wide shift in the climate, then the official IPCC based climate modelling which is almost totally and blindly and even deliberately ignorantly based only on the human generated CO2 effects on the climate will be put back two or three decades and will have to start all over again from a new perspective.

And that of course will mean the complete destruction of the work of a whole generation of climate modellers whose work will no longer have any veracity [ it so far hasn't in any case ] or any relevance to the probably large climate shifts interspersed with decadal long periods of varying and unpredictable lengths of relatively benign climate that might give the impression that climate is predictable.
the demise of the current IPCc credited climate modellers I suspect will be greeted with a good deal of glee in some quarters and a chorus of “we tried to tell you but you were too damn arrogant to listen”.

Climate wise we live in interesting times;
I suspect it has always been so
And I suspect it will always be so.

And I suspect that if we see another major climate shift with this El Nino, similar or stronger than the Great Pacific Climate Shift of 1997-98 the CAGW / climate change cause is scientifically dead and buried .

The Carcase of course being predominantly Green will take a lot to bury and will create quite a stink during the burial process.

“The mean temperature of the IPWP has fallen 1°C since spring 2013. The current temperature has never been this cool since ARGO measurements started in 2004. Here we are describing a water amount of approximately 16 million cubic KILOMETERS, taking the share of land into consideration in the IPWP! Here a quantity of energy is released that is equivalent to 4 days of sunshine over the entire planet”
That is 1% of the total annual insolation!

Oil rich Venezuela cannot maintain its grid power.
It, logically, meets the shortage of toilet paper by reducing food availability.
This brings to mind the Phoenix Theatre in 1963, Peter O’Toole playing the lead in Bertolt Brecht’s “Baal” sung a song about the toilet, the last stanza being;

“At last you learn the truth upon that seat
you only eat in order to – excrete”.

There are health benefits in this which brings me to the other example, The Peoples Republic of Korea. In this nation of 25m there is only one obese person. The “Great Successor” of the “Dear Leader” has taken on himself to save the nation from the sin of surfeit “on the Imitation of the Buddha”, thus realising the Marxist inversion of the Vicarious Atonement, the people die for the sins of the Messiah.

My day job takes me onto the dementia wards of the local care homes, which I find to be oases of calm and reason. The outside world, in contrast, follows the 15th book of the Apocrypha, the gospel according to St. Alzheimer.

AndyG55. sorry for the repost ..My error.
“I think you mean, “carbon-credit-economy green”, or simply, ‘Carbon Green’.
Very different to merely “green” as Peter Andrews perhaps as an example of this kind of green. Bit old fashioned i know.
Just trying to find some better distinction’s.
Thanks
Mike

Just use a variation of some of the usual Green Blob [ il] logic here and you have the solution to a major Australian climate problem, the havoc that El Ninos create with dry, drought and etc.

Build a lot of decent sized coal fired power generation plants and feed their power into those Windmills to get them spinning and blowing and they might then get the winds blowing faster across the Pacific and thus keep the Nino regions stable and that might mean the permanent end of El Ninos and its tendency to create droughts here in eastern Australia.

Now when do I get the media attention and a number of laudatory articles from the ABC and other media organisations for promoting a solution to the problems the El Ninos create just like all those climate scientists and Greens spokespersons regularly get for suggesting and promoting all sorts of far out wack job solutions to Climate Change?

Like any organisation, the BOM does a fair bit of self promotion and a lot of waffling on subjects they haven’t yet quite figured out so as to cover the fact they haven’t yet got a decent handle and a full understanding of the subject.
Just view any firm claims they make with a very jaundiced eye and you will be somewhere near the reality.

We are after all discussing weather and climate and so far about the only real outcomes after a century of trying to forecast weather is that the major weather forecasting organisations generally, but not always, get the forecasts fairly close out to about 4 days ahead.
After that looms a very large question mark about any forecasts further out.

Of course if you believe their forecasts for 4000 days ahead or more, ie; Climate predictions, you only get what you deserve.

As for climate predictions, seasonal and decadal, well if you are in a business like agriculture that relies on what Nature tosses up each year, trying to follow the official forecasters seasonal and decadal predictions is a fast path to bankruptcy.

I know!
I trusted the claims of these outfits back in the late 1990′s when still farming.
I tried following a number of climate orientated organisations seasonal predictions for about a year and a half and the came to the conclusion that it was mostly utter [ modelled ] BS they were feeding up to the gullible such as I was then.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve not been able to figure why some people think a peak transient of this El Nino must to be interpreted as ‘the pause’ being at an end. Only a failure to return to the prior level and trend after several more years can determine that. If peak T was only 30% to 50% of observed Feb peak, would they still be saying the pause is over?

The importance of that is that RH therefore directly affects the height of the WVEL simply because of the lapse rate which imposes a higher temperature at lower heights and a lower temperature at greater heights.

If you increase RH then the WVEL will fall exactly as observed and contrary to AGW theory which incorrectly predicted a rise in emissions levels to higher colder locations thus allowing the surface to warm.

The actuality is a falling WVEL which lowers the average emissions level for the globe as a whole thereby exerting a cooling effect at the surface.

That is the mechanism I proposed to David Evans in support of his hypothesis that, somehow, the thermal effect of CO2 is offset by an equal and opposite effect from the other routes (pipes) whereby radiation can be lost to space.

I have also explained how GHGs achieve that effect.

GHGs reduce the slope of the lapse rate at lower levels in the vertical plane which slows convection in rising columns of air and allows humidity to build up at lower levels.

Again, that is confirmed by observations of increased humidity lower down and decreased humidity higher up.

In a world ruled by common sense those observations combined with the knowledge of how RH affects the WVEL should be accepted as a full disproof of AGW theory.

An interesting and factual analysis of Tasmania’s energy problem. I think the salient point is the profits made from the sale of “green energy” (minus TVPS electricity) are far less than the costs of keeping the state in electricity at the moment, diesel generators, curbing of industrial production, cable repair perhaps (act of God, or over heating), etc.

Looking at the BOM rainfall maps for the west coast catchment area for the past three years, one can hardly blame a drought; they have had average rainfall. Look at the Strathgordon figures of 2500 mm. annually.

To run the dams into the Summer months (in a winter rainfall zone) with only a 22% reserve and be forced to use 40% Yallourn electricity is a highly dubious management decision in the first place particularly with past experience of variable rainfall from time to time. In 1967 things were very grim, daylight saving, no street lights, a diesel electric ship to the Bell Bay Al. smelter. So there would be still be a few staff who can remember this, and H.T. has kept its own records of rainfall and dam inflows for decades.

So it gets back to the politicians and top management for very poor decisions. The Chairman of Hydro. Tas. for sometime has been David Crean, a former Legislative Council member and brother of Simon Crean. What did the board do about these decisions apart from go along with them? Were the greens involved? Lots of interesting questions to answer. What is the intangible effect of this on Hydro Tasmania’s green image?

About as close to Truth as anything I have seen written so far. I left this comment:

Well composed and factual, with a couple of exceptions:
a) “On receiving the Tamar Valley station, Hydro Tasmania immediately cannibalised its book value down to zero and commenced decommissioning it in June 2014.”
False. There was no “commencement of decommissioning”. The facility was prepared for intermediate to long term storage using state of the art techniques.

b)”From 2012 to 2014, Hydro Tasmania had been a busy little bee, flogging off as much hydroelectricity as it could and closing down and selling the Tamar Valley power station’s major parts. ”
False. No parts of the asset were sold. However, it wasn’t for lack of trying. You might be conflating TVPS with Bell Bay Power, which of course, being decommissioned, was relieved of any components that were salvageable, as one would expect.

El Nina and El Nino are a small recognisable part of chaos, chaos per sec is normal world climate chasing its tail toward beauty that is unachievable because of varying parameters. Climate will always change as the entire world is a coupled system chasing it’s tail for stability. When the imputs and outputs get beyond the capabilities of the system we have an ice age and vice versa, things can change rather quickly. 11,000 years ago one could walk to Tasmania, we warmed up a bit flooding some beautiful cities and civilisations, it was not our fault. Tho’ some blamed the gods, it was not their fault either.

We know little about our planet, yet many tend to think we know much and can control the climate,god luck with that. We have been blessed with a couple of warm periods that civilisation flourished and gave birth to our modern thought and civilisation. The L.I.A showed how this could easily be destroyed, one can only hope that the down turn of the solar cycles is not a harbinger of a somewhat bigger ice age. Cheers

Indeed Wayne and that is why such oversimplified causality explanations of chaotic climate events make no sense what so ever, especially when based on very short term observations of dubious veracity.

Simple chaos explained here is complex enough when all initial conditions are known. How more erratic does the pattern become when, as with climate, there are so many more parameters, more degrees of freedom.

i) AGW theory proposes that GHGs warm the surface by radiating downwards. That INCREASES convection so that RH at the surface drops, the WVEL rises to a higher, colder location and radiates less to space, the surface has warmed.

ii) In reality, as per observations, GHGs present in the vertical column distort the lapse rate slope to the warm side which SLOWS convection. That causes RH at the surface to rise, the WVEL falls to a lower warmer height and radiates more to space, the surface does not warm.

The recent surge in lower troposphere temperatures, evident in the satellite data, may not last. But this warming has already broken what was a pause, defined as no significant increase in temperature i.e. no trend/a flat line.

We now have a significant spike, temperatures are cycling up. The pause is no more.

Also, this warmth is unlikely to be just ‘noise’. These type of events, often described as an El Nino, occurs at fairly regular intervals. The last big El Nino was in 1997/98, exactly 18 years ago, and corresponding with the last minimum declination of the moon.

Are you projecting another step upwards from this El Nino as from those in the 20th century? Even if that does happen it is still mostly likely a natural rise from the past long run of high solar activity. If the oceanic thermal inertia is lengthy it could be that the step down that I anticipate might be deferred until after a La Nina a couple of ENSO cycles down the line.

What do you say about the tiny increase over the 1997/98 peak averaged over 18 years as compared to the model expectations at a time of rapidly rising CO2 emissions?

Whether the pause is broken or not the models are so far out as to be highly misleading for policy purposes.

“The concept of a pause may have been useful, particularly to demonstrate the growing gulf between the models and reality. But the pause is no more.”

I suspect that this could be premature speculation.
If there is a following La Niña that is just as low as the El Niño spike is high, they would cancel each other. Therefore they would have zero effect on the ‘pause’, and the overall smoothed trend curve would still be approximately level for the last ~18 years.
As usual, alarmists and skeptics alike, will have to wait to observe what will happen to the global climate.

CO2 rise has so little effect on global temperatures as to be insignificant. Just look at the proportion of CO2 against water vapor.

Jennifer, we do not at all know that temperatures are “cycling up”. We need to wait and see what happens, however according to predictions of sunspot activity we can in fact expect temperatures to cycle down.

I regard this El Niño as being the last gasp of rising temperatures. It has set up conditions for a very rapid decline in global temperatures.

The term “cycle” is problematic. A switch to the word “episode” and episodic works better (for me**) in regard to La Niña & El Niño that are not regular in contrast to such as a major lunar standstill, which takes place every 18.6 years.

**Not everyone makes chocolate pie the way we do – so says cousin Pat.

I see cycles within climate data. I don’t really see episodes. The cycles can be decomposed and shown to consist of overlapping cycles of varying intensities and lengths.

While Backslider may like to ponder what is going to happen in 30 years, and feel more comfortable with a prediction 30 years out, the reality is that the shorter cycles are important particularly to food producers.

Any unifying theory of climate should be able to forecast these shorter cycles, as well as the the longer cycles.

What would make what your trying to do fail as a forecast for a long term is many other factors that will throw that off such as a wicked hurricane season or the sun firing off extra flares, etc. Jetstream movement…

Jennifer,
Have you checked the salinity differences of the ocean surface water?
I used to follow Dr. Ruth Curry’s work on sea surface ocean salt changes.
That definitely would effect the evaporation cycle with our atmospheres vibrating Nitrogen which is highly heat reactive.

“Climate scientists are monitoring this with amazement,” said Cai Wenju, a principal CSIRO research scientist who has published widely on the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern. “We only understand what we have seen.”

What they do agree on is that there have now been three “super-El Niños” in the space of just over three decades — in 1982-83, 1997-98, and now 2015-16.

(There is that lunar 18.6 year cycle)

This unusual recurrence gives weight to a forecast made by Wenju Cai of Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, two years ago that headline-grabbing “super El Niños” were in the process of upgrading from once every 20 years to once every ten years.

Not everyone agrees with this conclusion.

Skeptics(?) such as Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, point out that climate models may be good at simulating ocean temperatures, but forecasting what might happen to the El Niño effect is far more difficult.

hen climate modelers feed ocean temperature data from past El Niños into supercomputers, they are none too good at predicting the occurrence of those prior El Niños.

it’s not the total water vapor that matters, it’s only the layer at the top

Well I can’t agree with this. A decline in sunspot activity will have a corresponding increase in cloud cover, so increased water vapor is perfect for this.

We could well see a very rapid decline on global temperatures with an increase in cloud cover. Cooling already appears to have begun looking at what is happening with ocean temperatures. If the heat that oceans are now releasing is not replenished then expect a nice big freeze.

Taking liberties with being offtopic… though on a blog perennial favourite topic.

Seems only last week I was pinching myself at the sight of the ABC publishing claims global warming would be LESS harmful than previously thought. Well, folks, prepare to be gobsmacked again.

Plant carbon dioxide may not make global warming worse, study suggestshttp://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-17/carbon-dioxide-from-plants-less-less-of-a-global-warming-problem/7248052
…
Plants absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and release it when they burn sugar to produce energy in a process known as respiration. For every 10 degrees Celsius of temperature increase, plants are known to double their rate of metabolism, which has led to fears that global warming will trigger a positive-feedback loop, switching plants from being a net carbon dioxide sink — absorbing more carbon dioxide than they release — to becoming a net source of the warming gas.
…
In their extensive analysis, which involved supplementary lab experiments, Dr Reich and colleagues compared the respiration rate of trees acclimatised to “warm” plots and controls acclimatised to “ambient temperature” plots.

They found that for the given 3.4C above normal, plants that had experienced the warming treatments increased respiration by only 5 per cent, while the controls increased respiration by a whopping 23 per cent.

Dr Reich said the findings reduce the likelihood that increased respiration in plants in a warming world would make global warming worse.

The count is now only two examples of such an about-face at the ABC, but dare we watch and hope it’s the start of a trend?

Oddly enough, no part of this press release says how much the plants decreased in dry mass. It only says the respiration rate increased 5%. If that output was compensated by a 5% increase in CO2 uptake (photosynthesis) rate then no loss of mass would occur. The 5% rate change doesn’t mean anything without the other necessary numbers.

He said the findings should apply to rainforest species, which have the same “machinery” for respiration, however to be sure these species would need to be tested.

Of course the key research finding is always that more research is needed! Absolutely shameless, aren’t they.

The Feb record is just a result of an upwards trend with a bunch of oscillations on top. The best known oscillation is ENSO, and it accounts for about 0.3C of Feb’s 0.5C ~deviation from the trend since 1975. Because the trend is upwards, every El Nino will have a reasonable chance of setting hottest month or year records. Temps will obviously come down from Feb’s record, it was about +1.5C vs pre-industrial, and we could easily see a month during the next La Nina that gets down to 0.8C vs p-i. The trend however, will carry on its merry way at ~0.18/dec.

The major greenhouse gas is water vapor at around 60,000ppm (average). CO2 is at 400ppm (not averaged!). Please note that CO2 measurements use dry air, so it is less with humidity (which is why all forcing calculations are plain wrong, along with the number not being averaged, which again would be lower).

If we look at the annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions against natural emissions, we find that our contribution is just 3% of the total.

If all of our emissions remained in the atmosphere, then it would only constitute 12ppm (but we know it’s not that much).

The question then is, what is the radiative forcing from 12ppm of CO2? Not very much, is it?

I have seen a figure for average water vapour level of 10,000 ppm but how that was calculated I don’t know, but suspect it included polar air which is very dry.
In the tropics where the solar radiation is higher then 40,000 ppm is common and when you compare IR spectra for water vapour and CO2 it is obvious that 100 parts of water vapour has far more effect than 1 part of CO2. Those who have been in a desert when the sun goes down will have noticed the sharp drop in temperature despite the supposed back radiation of CO2. Contrast that with what happens in the tropics. That should not be taken as belief in the AGW Radiation Theory, rather as a pointer to which gas has the greater effect on the lower atmosphere.

So without humans, you have CO2 emissions of ~x, and CO2 uptake of ~x leaving us with a stable level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

With humans you have emissions of 1.03x and uptake of ~1.02x (uptake increases as a result of the emissions increase, enough to account for around 2/3rds increased emissions), leaving a net gain in atmospheric CO2 of about 1% a year.

You are also right that water vapor is the GHG with the most absolute impact. The amount of water vapor the air can hold is a function of temperature. So when GHGs trap more heat, the air can hold more water vapor, which then adds to the initial heat-trapping effect of the CO2. This is why water vapor is known as the primary feedback mechanism in GHG theory.

“You are also right that water vapor is the GHG with the most absolute impact. The amount of water vapor the air can hold is a function of temperature. So when GHGs trap more heat, the air can hold more water vapor, which then adds to the initial heat-trapping effect of the CO2. This is why water vapor is known as the primary feedback mechanism in GHG theory.”

Why stop there? Obviously the added heat from the water enables more water to evaporate further adding to the heat. You are describing a runaway positive feedback, given the effectively infinite supply of water. As this does not happen, the theory is obviously flawed.
Have you ever read anything by Bob Tisdale?
Evaporation cools the surface (therefore reducing OLWR).
Condensation in the upper troposphere releases the heat for radiation to space. This process in the tropics is the biggest rapid path of heat loss for the planet.

Keep in mind that the majority of incoming Solar radiation falls into the large planet wide Tropical zone,where Water Vapor is highest, dwarfing the already small warm forcing CO2 effect there.

CO2 effect is greatest in the polar regions where Water Vapor is low,but where solar radiation comes in a shallower angle in a small regions of the planet.

CO2 is a trace gas doing nearly nothing where it counts the most,in the tropical region,the polar regions are largely irrelevant. The air temperature is about the same for millions of years now in the Tropical region bordering the Equator of the planet.

The reason their climate software models fail to match the Mesozoic climate is because the paleoclimatologists make the incorrect assumption that the Mesozoic atmosphere was the same thickness as the present. As stated earlier, the variation of temperatures around a planet whether it is day or night or according to latitude, is a function of the thickness of a planet’s atmosphere. Planets or moons with no atmosphere will have the most extreme difference in temperatures, planets such as the present day Earth and Mars that have relatively thin atmosphere will still have these differenced in temperatures but much less extreme, while extreme thick atmosphere planets such as Venus and the Mesozoic Earth show almost no temperature difference at all according to latitude, seasonal changes in sunlight, or variation in temperature between day and night.

At the equator the rays of the Sun are usually shining nearly directly down on the surface so as to heat this area of the Earth more than any other. The air directly above this surface expands after gathering this heat. This hot, low density air is more buoyant than the air around it and so it pushes up and rises up to a higher altitude. As this air mass rises it must push the air above it out of the way and at the same time the nearby air masses are drawn in towards the equator so as to take the place of the departing hot air mass. Once the new air mass moves over the equator it is next in this process of heating up so as to later ascend. The process keeps on repeating with each air mass pushing or pulling the others along so as to form a continuous conveyer belt of air flowing in a circular pattern.

Once convection currents are established they are extremely effective in transporting heat from warm areas to cold areas. The hot air that rises at the equator would travel all the way to the cold poles except that the present atmosphere is too thin to support such elongated convection cells. So instead of reaching either the north or south pole the air from the equator comes back down in elevation at around 30 degrees latitude before heading back to the equator. Below is a diagram produced by NASA showing the idealized three convection cells per hemisphere circulating pattern of the atmosphere.

” The trend however , will continue at 0.18/dec ” Tristan you don’t know that , Maunder cycles have been relatively strong and active since the end of the LIA , but cycle 24 has been very weak so you can’t assume that your trend will continue

They cannot understand how and why the pattern they try to recreate, never can be exactly duplicated unless they tweak and play with the data for their own project to be viable for government grants and publication.
Everything constantly changes. Even history can never be exactly duplicated as new technology or knowledge helps to expand those changes.

I thought that was all abandoned last year for the “so called” more accurate ship engine intake and GISS land measurements per Karl and Schmidt. Please pardon my obvious sarcasm, but I would expect we will be modeling everything soon, and fully abandon observations in the near term to achieve some global goal, no? Frankly, I have no idea why the name “Pause” is used in any discussion. I would think it better to be viewed as a segment of a cycle. Just my take.

Thankyou Jo for doing what you do! I don’t think the importance of such is conveyed enough.

I noticed a change of pattern through out the western USA about a year ago.

And all this after Obama visited California and predicted disaster and possible a drought extending for at least the next 40 years; if we didn’t curb c02 emissions drastically as soon as possible. God indeed has a sense of humor.

One cannot help but notice the increasing irrelevance of climate ‘scientivists’ in the face of the wide natural variation of a complex, non-linear stochastic system, one which permits the statisticians an infinite playground and the policymakers, a playground of infinite propaganda.

Predictably the real world that defeats them all.
Celestial humour trumps ’42′ every time.

17 Mar: GWPF: Clive James Pours Poetic Scorn On Climate Fears
by Kaya Burgess, The Times
Clive James has described concerns over climate change as “manufactured fright” in a new poem and says that environmental disaster, like his death, is yet to materialise…
A new James poem, to be published tomorrow in the New Statesman, is entitled Imminent Catastrophe and discusses the theme of being left “awkwardly still lingering”.
It does so by drawing a comparison with the gravest consequences of climate change, which, in his opinion, are yet to be seen.
“The imminent catastrophe goes on,/ Not showing many signs of happening,” he writes. “The ice at the North Pole that should be gone/ By now, is awkwardly still lingering. “And though sometimes the weather is extreme/ It seems no more so than when we were young/ Who soon will hear no more of this grim theme/ Reiterated in the special tongue/ Of manufactured fright.”… (LINK)http://www.thegwpf.com/clive-james-pours-poetic-scorn-on-climate-fears/

posted this here, but also posted the pathetic outcome of the European Council meeting on jo’s previous “Hottest seasonally” thread.
the press release pretends CAGW was a major topic alongside migration, but the live blog posts at EurActiv (link provided) tell a different story and MSM is now reporting on the meeting with not a mention of CAGW! lol.

… the MSM is now reporting on the meeting with not a mention of CAGW …

But plenty about granting 70 million Turkish citizens the right to trammel freely through the inner EU and settle wherever they choose in return for Erdokan having his navy re-interdict the migration boats across the Aegean this summer to un-embarrass Frau Merkel

That sort of comment is weird as well as undefined. I know this is a distraction but why write that? Anyone, including me with regard to you, can write something like that at any time since such rhetorical bluster is easily conjured. Is it a feel good thing or a call to arms. It is certainly not making me feel there is any value in debating you.

Gee this is difficult. JM IMPLIES… JM guesses without evidence but also says emphatically the opposite of what you want to hear. Read the whole thing. Anyway we can argue this all night but in reality the quotes are there for anybody to read themselves. Hopefully they weren’t like you and needed me to point them out

Hi everyone, I’m Marcus from The Marcus Review. To all those here who have read my article on Tasmania’s energy scandal, given kind (and highly useful) feedback and shared it with others: thank you very, very much. I run my blog as a labour of love and your actions motivate me to keep going:

I would also be interested in a technical explanation about the fault in the cable. I know it was overloaded and “fried” but how can it even be overloaded? Surely there are mechanism to stop this? And are the conductors and insulation burned or melted? Were there no redundant conductors? Why no redundant cable? Etc..

With a population of only half a million, it was difficult enough to justify the single cable.
It is often maligned as being to expensive as it is.
I believe it exists because some thought it an opportunity to effectively transfer revenue from the mainland to the island.
Perhaps they had a premonition of Gillard and the tax o n air.

‘I am concerned that the huge loss of energy from the oceans, through the Arctic , to space will cause major cooling over the next several years.’

Don’t be concerned, natural variables rule so a Gleissberg is on the way and humanity will adapt as it always has. This quote came from Michael Hammer in Jo’s link to the Bill Kininmonth guest post.

‘One thing which strikes me very pointedly is the negative feedback implied. If ocean current heat transport declines then that directly leads to an increase in atmospheric heat transport and vice versa. Yet again, what we see in naturally stable systems is a dominance of negative feedback loops. This contrasts so strongly with the warmists who see positive feedback in everything to do with climate. Without the claimed positive feedback there is no AGW crisis.’

fascinating – Gallup’s annual (election year?) poll, with the same old loaded questions, such as –

“Next, thinking about the issue of global warming, how well do you feel you understand this issue?”

and contradictory results such as

“Do you think that global warming will pose a serious threat to you or your way of life in your lifetime?” with 57% saying “NO”…

and the MSM is not picking it up, or not yet.
not a single MSM result found online so far! does the MSM know it is not credible?
claims concern is up 9 percent(?) among Republicans & Independents, 6 percent among Democrats!

16 Mar: Gallup: U.S. Concern About Global Warming at Eight-Year High
by Lydia Saad and Jeffrey M. Jones
Sixty-four percent of U.S. adults say they are worried a “great deal” or “fair amount” about global warming, up from 55% at this time last year and the highest reading since 2008…
Mirroring this, the March 2-6 survey — conducted at the close of what has reportedly been the warmest winter on record in the U.S. — documents a slight increase in the percentage of Americans who believe the effects of global warming have already begun. Nearly six in 10 (59%) today say the effects have already begun, up from 55% in March 2015…
Concern about global warming has increased among all party groups since 2015, although it remains much higher among Democrats than Republicans and independents. For example, 40% of Republicans say they worry a great deal or fair amount about global warming, up from 31% last year. The percentage of independents expressing concern has also increased nine points, from 55% to 64%. Democrats’ concern is up slightly less, from 78% to 84%…
LINK View survey methodology, complete question responses and trends.http://www.gallup.com/poll/190010/concern-global-warming-eight-year-high.aspx

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty naturally has plenty of anti-Trump propaganda between the excerpts, but no wonder the CAGW establishment hates him:

17 Mar: REFERL: Mike Eckel: Trump Catches Fire In Depressed Coal Region
The coal industry is in decline and jobs are scarce, young people are moving away, and the man to whom people here in this Blue Ridge Mountain state are looking for answers is the unlikeliest of candidates: a flamboyant real-estate tycoon and reality-TV star from New York City named Donald Trump.
“I would call it angry desperation. They’re mad and they’re angry and they’re also desperate for help and answers,” Mullins says…
And it’s in working-class, mostly white places like here in Buchanan County, wedged between West Virginia and Kentucky, where his campaign for the White House has gained the greatest momentum…
Trump walked away with nearly 70 percent of the Republican vote in the primary — trouncing second-place Florida Senator Marco Rubio (nearly 14 percent) and third-place Texas Senator Ted Cruz (nearly 12 percent) — his highest tally of any county in the country so far.
The victory surprised some pundits. Trump hadn’t even campaigned in Buchanan County; the closest he came was on February 29 in Radford, Virginia, a three-hour drive to the east over a mountain road…
The Trump campaign’s website suggests southwest Virginia has absorbed “the brunt of the failed and misguided government policies for years,” accusing Obama of waging an “outright war on coal [that] has uprooted and destroyed families and entire communities.”
It’s a message that resounded with people like Deborah Bostic, a 53-year-old employee of a local state agency whose husband hasn’t been able to find work since losing his job at a surface-mining operation last fall.
Trump “seems to be one that wants to, you might say, take the bulls by the horns. He seems like he’ll just jump right in there and get things done,” Bostic says.
“He’s a businessman and he’s very successful, and maybe it’s time that someone runs the country like a business,” she says…http://www.rferl.org/content/us-election-trump-virginia-coal/27616741.html

Water Vapour peaks correspond with peaks in the annual increment in CO2 concentration and also correspond with the maxima in the 13 month moving average for the satellite lower tropospheric temperature of the Tropics – Land component indicating that CO2 is likely generated by life forms – moulds, yeasts? – in the Equatorial zone. That is, carbon plus water plus warmth means life.

The IPCC has promulgated a massive deception in claiming that CO2 causes global warming when the opposite is true, increases in the temperature of the Tropics zone causes increased microbial activity which results in an increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration.

The current severe Solar induced Orbital Dry Period started circa 110 degrees longitude (Beijing) in February 2014 – reaching Australia in early January 2015. It will last in Australia until 2020, when the next Two Year Wet/Normal Period will prevail. This Dry Period consists of various shorter ‘Dry Cycles’. It previously occurred in 1997 – 1979 – etc. The Lunar Metonic Cycle (2016,) may exacerbate this Dry Period, to the extent of rendering a potentially ‘Wet’ 2018 to be Dry.
These Solar Induced ‘Dry’ Cycles move East to West, with the Solar Orbit of the Earth’s Magnetic Field.
Prevailing Weather, or Cloud/Condensation, moves from West to East.(Axial Spin.) In Australia’s case it moves from North-west to South-east – originating predominantly over the Indonesian Archipelago.
Rather than the UK Met Office’s ‘Wavy’ Jet Stream, or the ‘intricacies’ of the ENSO Fantasy – consider the following:

Dust and Energy

“It is known that when a volcano erupts with explosive violence it ejects an enormous quantity of heat energy, as well as dust etc., not only into the lower atmosphere (troposphere) but also it ejects large amounts of both dust and energy into the stratosphere. The evidence of the latter is manifested in those brilliant, rosy sunsets, which have been prevalent for the latter half of 1983…..

“Quite apart from the cooling effect that the stratospheric dust from volcanoes has on the world’s climate, there is another effect which interests me, as a student of the climate/weather as it affects our region.

“To wit, the sudden and violent thrusting of the extra energy into the well-ordered circulatory system of the stratosphere sets up an equally violent reaction.
(Newton’s Third Law – for every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction.)

“Well, the form that the stratospheric reaction takes is to set up a series of cyclones and anti-cyclones to absorb the extra energy.

Deep Low Pressure Systems

“It is also known (see Ref. No 14a) that the stratosphere superimposes the above reactions on the troposphere (the ‘trickle down’ effect,) so that those volcano-induced stratospheric vortices turn into Tropospheric deep low pressure systems which I suspect to be the genesis of the rather frequent, rain-bearing cloud masses, which have been feeding in from the north-west over the past year.

No Accident

“I’m of the opinion that it will be shown to be not just an accident, that the weatherman’s ‘upper atmospheric disturbance’ happens to be associated with a rain-bearing depression, or ‘deep low pressure system’ and that frequently, the cause might well turn out to be an exploding volcano.”